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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

I’m a father of fraternal twins who will be 25 this year. One boy, one girl. My wife wanted to raise them in a gender-neutral environment - provide “boy” toys and “girl” toys and let them play with whichever they wanted. My wife was a stay-at-home mom so the kids never went to daycare.

What happened?

My daughter played with baby dolls - mothering them and taking care of them. My son? He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. He also liked to use Barbie dolls as hammers.

My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do. It appears to be biological. We’ve known a few other couples who tried the same thing and had similar results. Leads me to believe the difference between the sexes is nature, not nurture, and probably goes back tens of thousands of years.

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Yep, the fact that this question is even being asked shows that flawed assumptions have been made.

We don't even have to get into the nature/nurture debate: It's possible that your daughter learned to play baby dolls by watching and imitating her mother. This counts as socialization according to these nature/nurture studies, but ...

To attempt to take away the human being from society, from parents, etc., and find out what this human being would do outside of human society is an act of extreme cruelty, because human beings cannot grow up and function in total isolation. This is why, although science can be applied to specific biological processes such as reflexes, it will never be able to describe a person or a person's behavior. This is why psychology and sociology are considered "soft sciences".

There absolutely is a genetic basis for behaviour though. A bird doesn't sing because it likes music. But because genes that exhibit that trait have a competitive advantage. And the same kind of thing can be seen in humans, and most keenly in babies and toddlers. Suddenly something happens in their brain and behaviours emerge by instinct.

There could easily be a genetic basis for why girls and boys like different things. And that is interesting. And obviously other factors play a role (like TV and siblings). The mistake is to believe that this is somehow a restriction on free will. The amazing thing about humans is out ability to break out of our genetic mold. The robin can never make rock music, but we can.

Also, no one is suggesting that we isolate some kids on a desert island to see what would happen. But there is nothing wrong with running that thought experiment! And maybe that understanding can help us break out of our genetic mold. We might be able to catch bad instinctive behaviours in ourselves and moderate them.

Memory in gene expressions might even account for the difference. Gene expressions can change during a lifetime and across a couple of generations (ie. memory of famine can last 2 generations in gene expression). There are outliers that go against the norms, so seems not hardcoded on chromosone level.

Funnily, this would make both "camps" correct!

It would be interesting if environmental factors had unexpected consequences down the line at a population level. Like famine leading to behavioral changes and effecting world events. There could be very compelling evidence out there to support claims like that, although obviously very difficult to establish causality.

I wouldn't be surprised to find gene expressions making Western-style education and standardized tests sub-optimal for whole swaths of people (hypothesis). Imagine if your very makeup go against what you're told should be just routine, but it goes against your innate body-mind preferences. Imagine that for whole tribes of people, and that maybe there are better paths more optimized to grow and educate different populations. Being able to communicate the gap or avoid misgivings, would be next to impossible.

A discussion of such would be less about identity, and more about who-we-shall-become, the evolving versions of ourselves, though also respecting heritage.

This is only possible with trust and common ground.

My sister had the exact same experience with fraternal twins. She was very vocal about providing gender neutral environment.

My children were not twins but both were decidedly birth gender centered.

There was a time my daughter asked for tools and matchbox cars which I promptly gave her when she returned from school. She played with them for a week and went back to polly pockets.

This is obviously not the case for everyone. However, from experience it is biologically driven.

It’s irritating that this is still a thing, even now.

Why is it so hard to acknowledge gender preferences?

While also acknowledging that it in no way implies competence in career and business?

The thing is it may also explain preferences in other areas, which may affect interest and competence. It is good to have some gender balance in most workplaces, and imbalance may worsen work conditions. Balance can make it more attractive for the opposite sex in general, not just for the outlier few.

Yes, but forcing balance via quota; or taking a naive approach like shoveling comp sci to girls; is taking a hammer approach to a very nuanced problem.

Programming used to be done by women. At some point it flipped, but even in the 1980s there was clearly greatness https://www.fastcompany.com/90151279/the-woman-supercomputer...

Though note that the above designer went off to become an artist.

Rather than forcing the issue, the question that ought to be asked is what made/makes a former mostly-women dominated field appear so unappealing to women today?

I should also point out to that high paying and very physically demanding jobs such as nursing are dominated by women.

The issue can be as simple as a image problem. Kids, who wants to be lazy, mostly alone in front of a screen, and solving problems quietly, and get paid well for it?

Of course, no one will even ask this question if it’s career suicide to do so.

80's became a huge boom to individuality and cut-throat competition, just saying.

What does the 1980s being cutthroat have anything to do with the topic at hand?

Sorry forgot explanation.

Alphamales tend to create and thrive in such workplace environment, to detriment of everyone else.

>My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do.

I don't have twins but I agree with this statement to a point. My daughter loves her Playmobil fire truck to the point that she slept with it a few times when she first got it. Her favorite stuffy was a frog for a while, until she started daycare and then we noticed interest in dolls growing.

I guess what I'm saying is that from my experience, social cues are much more powerful than people often like to think.

That's informative. In fact I bet physiology plays a strong role in our preferences whether or not we consciously realize it.

I was watching a documentary lately where some group of fish spent days climbing up the rock behind a waterfall with very low rates of success to lay their eggs. It felt incredible some code in their genes affects them at a point in their life where their utmost goal becomes swimming upstream no matter the dangers and they prefer doing that to, well, enjoying life in the sea.

Just for a fun question: were the kids exposed to societal pressure in the form of, for example, other kids or YouTube or movies, that may have had an impact?

I am hoping this is a rhetorical question as no one lives in a vacuum. The point is what they take away from these experiences and that tends to be driven heavily by biology.

Just a fun question for you, have you raised children? At least one of each sex?

I have not raised children; but very young children can tell gender apart from other kids ("Cooties, eeewww"), and they may be wanting to emulate the person of the same gender as them doing things like play with guns as sticks, etc.

The conclusion made: that one gender likes to play with guns, the other likes to be nurturing, aren't necessarily binding, is why I brought up external factors.

It is really tough to draw conclusions until you have spent every moment of your life with a very young child. Initial interests/behaviors and the intensity of those interests/behaviors are most often gender centered. I am talking 10mo+.

At this age they have had very little social interaction/pressure and begin to behave in very gender specific ways. To ignore biology in this case seems short sighted especially in the context of evolution and every other mammalian species on the face of the earth. I can point out the boys and girls in a litter of puppies at 4 weeks. They just behave differently.

( Again, so I don't get flamed, this is not a 100% statement because biology is distinctly individual but the tendency significantly overwhelming ).

This makes some sense, but your analysis assumes that observed parental gender roles aren’t responsible for the patterning you describe before 1yr. I’d be more convinced of an analysis of child rearing in a “gender neutral environment” created by those who do not have the gender they were assigned at birth. Do these patterns still occur? I’d be more inclined to buy a biological explanation then, but without that, all you’re telling me is that a 10mo baby is extremely adept at absorbing patterns from their parents.

> observed parental gender roles aren’t responsible for the patterning you describe before 1yr

How does a baby of less than 12 months recognise its own gender in either of the parents?

Parents recognize their own gender/sex in the baby, and babies can easily pattern off of differing levels of attention or different kinds of moment-to-moment emotional feedback.

This would assume that the father for instance is crashing cars into each other, wrestling his friends, shooting at the neighbors, jumping off the back of the couch, tearing heads off of dolls, etc.

Most of the behaviors I am discussing are not patterned by a parent in anyway.

Aggression can absolutely be patterned by parents.

Sure it can but it isn't in most households. Certainly not mine therefore these behaviors were not influenced.

What's the process of evaluating whether a kid's gender matches their sex. You can easily check their sexual organs and/or measure their hormonal levels (if they differ at all at that age) at least.

Other than the physiology are you going to ask a kid "hey, do you feel like a boy or a girl?" Because it isn't clear to me what that question means exactly and whether a kid can answer that.

To state the obvious, no one knows what it is like to be someone else. We can compare what interests us, motivates us etc and say "I am more like that person than this other person". So I suppose the question might be framed in that way?

> I’d be more convinced of an analysis of child rearing in a “gender neutral environment” created by those who do not have the gender they were assigned at birth

I agree with you about some stuff, but you're wrong about this. Transgender people aren't magically free of gendered societal influences. Some are shitty sexists who prefer strict gender roles. Speaking as a transgender person.

This is very fair, and I could have phrased with more nuance. Upon reflection I'm actually not sure how I could be convinced that you'd raised a child without gender influence.

> I have not raised children

Find another post to comment on then

>very young children can tell gender apart from other kids

2 and 3 year olds can't. By 4 they can.

When my kids were very young (3 years?), they had a hard time telling gender apart, including their own. It may seem absurd to an adult, but from a toddler's point of view, grouping granny/mom/sister as one and grandpa/dad/brother in another is simply not very useful. They have to individually memorize "Yes, mom is a woman, and dad is a man" before they finally understand the concept.

So I don't think social pressure affects choices of play - a toddler will happily play with cars or dolls while they don't even know they're boys/girls.

A young boy I know loves playing with toy weapons.

He also loves playing cook, and playing "taking care of the baby" with a doll.

Luckily, he's allowed to.

> Luckily, he's allowed to.

I'm not sure I've heard of kids not being allowed to play with something (except for sex and dangerous or precious items). Also, if a child wants to play with a doll or a gun, any object will do, if needed.

There are definitely many people who will anywhere from dissuade to scold a child for playing with toys that don't fit that person's idea of a "gender appropriate" toy.

I believe it- there's always people doing stupid things-, I just don't have any first or second hand experience of it, just hearsay. So I can't say how common it is.

Also, as I kid I was dissuaded and scolded for playing with many things- nothing really worked, I still had great fun with fire and live 220V cables :).

But were you shamed, by peers or parent?

Even a funny look or surprise will be cues children pick up immediately. Not that social conditioning is a bad thing, but humans just don't survive in a bubble.

> Luckily, he's allowed to.

Nobody I know of, on any side of this debate, has argued against letting kids choose what they want to do. The problem is when "my child likes playing with dolls" suddenly becomes "time to cut off my child's penis".

Are you able to cite an example of this particular, direct consequence?

I find it amazing people learn this parents?

Did your parents not tell you this? Did you not have friends who were parents?

Not trying to insult, but this reminds me of mothers I know who think boys are just girls with penises and are horrified when the boys pick up sticks and want to brain each other.

I have seen many examples where giving a boy a sword is “teaching him violence” but lecturing him over and over that swords are hurtful is someone “letting his natural gentleness come out”.

> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.

Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.

Two genders can observe the same thing, but attach different levels of importance to the observation, and have different preferences for imaginative play based on what they’ve observed.

Or identify with who they've seen do things in different ways.

Before self identification, there might be external expectations and cues. Survival of children depend on picking up cues of parents, and then peers.

Any two people will certainly attach different levels of importance to what they observe, I agree.

Given that this behaviour was learned by observation, society's existing gender norms - and specifically those around guns - would also have been observed and learned. We can't separate these, in this anecdote.

Would we not expect to observe the son to engage with more caring play if the stay-at-home parent (primary carer) had been the dad?

>> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.

> Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.

Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby. The specific behaviors are learned, but the preferences may not be.

I suspect that if you manged to raise some boys and girls a a completely gender neutral environment without those social influences, they'd spontaneously invent primitive and somewhat disorganized versions of the same behaviors (sort of like with language, e.g. a critical mass of deaf children will spontaneously invent a sign language together if they're not taught one).

If your claim is that gender differentiated behaviour in children is spontaneously observed due only to nature, why do you need to invent an example? You've never seen a girl play with a stick like it's a baby, because that's not a thing that girls typically do (I doubt you can find a single example of this).

Girls treat the outdoors generally the same as boys do, and iirc are recorded climbing trees in the same numbers.

How about a chimpanzee? The young females have been observed to use sticks as dolls, playing with them like babies. The young males tend to use sticks as tools and weapons.

IMHO, this ends the argument.

The article that I'm reading claims that boy chimps like to play with toy trucks: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chi...

You're gonna therefore have to explain to me why you think this is natural behaviour. Since, as I understand, trucks were invented by humans.

Isn't it just that chimpanzees are social and have been cued by human expectations, their captors and immediate relatives?

I have ABSOLUTELY seen many young girls (3-7 yo) playing with sticks or similar objects as if they are babies / dolls.

In communist Romania of my youth, where toys were sparse.

In Egypt nowadays, in poor families who can't pay for toys.

>Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby.

Do you have children?

> It appears to be biological.

Even assuming "its biological", that means that every single boy in the country must be disposed to liking guns, and every single girl must like to mother baby dolls?

And you'd think that a community of "Hackers" would be a bit less concerned about what the bulk of the population does and a bit more interested in the outliers.

A biological effect on character doesn’t rule out outliers.

I’m not sure what u are trying to say tbh. Conceding there is something biological at play doesn’t mean no boy is ever allowed to play with a Barbie.

No need to be too black and white in that statement. Perhaps a better analogy would be men tend to be taller than women, but there are many women who are taller than men.

Yes, but that is not the sentiment being expressed in this thread or the post I responded to.

Honestly, I'm quite surprised by how much people here seem to think it's biological. It seems to me there is no way society's slight move toward encouraging gender-neutral playing isn't still strongly offset by the pervasive culture of machismo and femininity. The second your boy steps foot into school, if he's wearing something pink or playing with a doll, other boys will make fun of him. A single incident like that is a plenty strong incentive to stick with same-gendered toys.

Have you raised kids? If not you may be surprised by the experience when you do so.

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